I’d like to share a passage from The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell. This is a clever book, because it is basically a book on the history of technology. That could be a dry and boring book that appeals only to a few history nerds, obviously, but what Mr. Dartnell has done is put a clever spin on that and write the book as though it were giving us instructions on how to “reboot” civilization after some disaster like a plague or catastrophic war. This is about two alternative designs for refrigeration.

If history is just one damn thing after another, then the history of technology is just one damn invention after another: a succession of gadgets each beating off inferior rivals. Or is it? Reality is rarely that simple, and we must remember that the history of technology is written by the victors: successful innovations give the illusion of a linear sequence of stepping stones, while the losers fade into obscurity and are forgotten. But what determines the success of an invention is not always necessarily superiority of function.

In our history both compressor and absorption designs for refrigeration were being developed around the same time, but it is the compressor variety that achieved commercial success and now dominates. This is largely due to encouragement by nascent electricity companies keen to ensure growth in demand for their product. Thus the widespread absence of absorber refrigerators today (except for gas-fueled designs for recreation vehicles, where the ability to run without an electrical supply is paramount), is not due to any intrinsic inferiority of the design itself , but far more due to contingencies of social or economic factors. The only products that become available are those the manufacturer believes can be sold at the highest profit margin, and much of that depends on the infrastructure that already happens to be in place. So the reason that the fridge in your kitchen hums – uses an electric compressor rather than a silent absorption design – has less to do with the technological superiority of that mechanism than with the quirks of the socioeconomic environment in the early 1900s, when the solution became “locked in.” A recovering post-apocalyptic society may well take a different trajectory in its development.